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What Data Center Designers Can Learn From Legos
1sockchuck writes "It takes most companies at least a year to build a new data center. Digital Realty Trust says it can build a new data center in just 20 weeks using standard designs and modular components that can be assembled on site. The company equates its 'building blocks' approach to data centers to building with Legos — albeit with customized parts (i.e. the Millennium Falcon Lego kit). Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly. Is this the future of data center design?"
Is this the future of data center design?
I'm going to assume you're talking very very large data centers here as it wouldn't make sense to streamline this for a few "blocks." But I think this is an already pretty pervasive idea. Why, we have already talked about Google's ideas on server 'blocks' and data 'pod' technology for their sharded databases. While I'm not sure if this high level design inherently affects relational databases negatively, it sure seems to be the future of data centers.
Google's strategy sounds even more like homogeneous Lego blocks than either of the two article's solutions.
My work here is dung.
The plural of "lego" is "lego".
Someone's going to retort that this is only because America hasn't built a new nuke power plant in ages, but the fact of the matter is that nuke power in Canada and France is reliable, efficient, and cheap because they have settled on a standard plant design. Contrast this with the fully customized design for each American nuke plant and you can see why we still consider nuclear power to be expensive and dangerous.
Extend this to software design. Sure, using standard libraries may mean that you are possibly using a sub-optimal algorithm or pulling in too many unwanted/unused features. But the alternative is to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. When it comes down to brass tacks, the cost spent to optimize software pales in comparison to the cost of delaying the product.
Use your time wisely.
Why on earth would you want to build a data centre? Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server. If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2. Only the really big players like Amazon and Google (and perhaps places that need lots of computing power, like research departments, movie studios and universities) need to bother with huge, air-conditioned rooms and all that.
I know I'm playing devil's advocate here and the number of computers needed to run a business never seems to fall in practice. But although data centres are certainly needed now, do they really have a 'future'?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Lego is a brandname, not an item, therefore it's an uncountable noun and cannot be a plural. If you mean Lego bricks, then use Lego bricks, not Legos. Bloody Americans, they'll be misspelling data centre next. Oh, wait...
This has been a broadcast on behalf of pedants everywhere.
I had this idea ages ago: computer blocks, which could plug together. Storage, processors, media, PSUs, batteries, interfaces... just bricks that you stack together using some universal power-and-data bus connector on each plug (imagine Lego blocks about eight inches long).
My blog
Lego system is not new and innovating. It has pluses and minuses. for likes of computer centers it probably has more pluses. It's cheap, quick and effective. as far as I know anyway.
Ability to add certain parts into building itself could be new approach, but nothing revolutionary so far. Having built in into wall microwave is not new either.
Well, that and the environut chicken littles that scream about 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl every time that someone wants to build a new plant here. Nothing like a little media coverage to give a fit of hysteria an air of legitimacy. That might have a bit to do with the whole "dangerous" perception.
If this is innovative, datacenters will be failing to impress for a long time
They use building-block server modules - each with a built-in battery backup.
I saw the "legonotlegos" tag on this story. Anyone who has read the paper materials that come with Lego sets knows the language about calling them "Lego(tm) bricks" not "Legos." Yes, the Lego company feels they have to write that in their products, because they have to protect the trademark in order to keep trademark protection in many world markets. However, that does not mean that regular people must actually follow that usage. You wanna call 'em Legos? Go ahead. You want to be the ten millionth middle-manager who tries to explain a business model or operational strategy using toy blocks of a certain name? Go ahead. The metaphor is already cliched, but go ahead. Just like Oreos (not Oreo(tm) cookies), or Kleenexes (not Kleenex(tm) brand facial tissues), people should not feel constrained in how they phrase popular culture references.
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Wouldn't surprise me if the Lego Group has its lawyers in attack mode as we speak.
"Software IC's" - nope, the Objective C guy trademarked that. Thanks, Brad!
How about "Lincoln Logs Data Centers"?
1 moose, 2 moose. 1 sheep, 2 sheep. 1 aircraft, 2 aircraft. 1 head of cattle, 2 head of cattle.[1] 1 bison, 2 bison, M.Bison. Or pretty much every word in Japanese or Chinese. But trademarks are adjectives, and in English, adjectives generally precede nouns. So the plural of "Lego brick" is "Lego bricks".
[1] "Head of cattle" is a precise epicene (gender-neutral) word for what is commonly called a "bull" or "cow".
Wouldn't surprise me if the Lego Group has its lawyers in attack mode as we speak.
Then how about actually partnering with Lego Group and calling it "Enterprise Mindstorms"?
As long as they aren't sleeping with them.
Coding Blog
Wish I could convince the bosses that I needed the $500 Millennium Falcon Lego kit for work...
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
If you look at the website:
http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=fairplay
Of course if its an adjective then "legos" is nonsense.
In common usage it is in fact a noun: the OED defines "Lego" as a noun. The plural of a noun has an 's', with the handful of well-established exceptions.
Who decided that LEGO was an exception? Not the LEGO Group who say its only an adjective. So I think its the fact that the LEGO Group never says "LEGOs" (since they always uses it as an adjective) caused misguided pedantic people (or otherwise any lover of arbitrary rules) to decide that its a plural noun.
So put me in the legos camp. :)
For a while, I had feared that you had devolved into mindless trolling, but this post ends all of that, it is a shining example of you living up to your name.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The Millennium Falcon Lego kit is made up almost entirely of generic pieces - triangles, rectangles, Technic-style crossbars, and so on. The only nonstandard bits in it are the bendable engine grills and the minifigs.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
"standard" English. :)
Modern American English has as much right to be considered standard: its dictionaries are just as old, its history just as deep, its evolution from 17th century English no greater.
I'm guessing British people get up in arms about whats "standard" since half their country doesn't speak anything like standard. The US does have its share of accents, but the ones in Britain are far more divergent and widespread. So get your own house in order before you start declaring that you own the standard.
Control: putting your sensitive and important information (and applications) in some "cloud" under the control of some other company is a bad idea.
Latency: The speed of light is still only about 300000 kilometres a second, and the actual latencies of remote servers in practice add up to even more (especially when encryption is involved).
You should say "Lego Bricks", not "Legos".
"Lego" is the name of the company.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Maybe this is what they were meaning instead? For a low fee one of the elves of Lord of the Rings will personally assist you in the construction and improvement of your data center!
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/
FYI it's e.g. not i.e.
And two about data centers.
News for nerds, or news for obsessive man children?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
"The company equates its "building blocks" approach to data centers to building with Legos -- albeit with customized parts (i.e. the Millennium Falcon Lego kit). Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly. Is this the future of data center design?"
It only makes sense to maintain the infrastructure to build the building blocks so long as data centers are being rolled out at a furious pace - something that cannot continue forever.
I suspect the 'Lego' builders are betting on vendor lock-in to feed the bottom line over the long term. Once you buy their bricks, you're pretty much stuck with their interface and thus will be coming back to them for upgrades and renovation.
Will someone please talk about data centers?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The different in time has nothing to do with building a data center.
Any data center, computer room, what have you, can be built in a matter of weeks.
The longer time is in transitioning your running services into that new space. Migrating an enterprise-sized infrastructure from one DC to another in one fell swoop is asking for disaster. Smart people do it in small manageable chunks, and it's defining the chunks, coordinating with the people who use those chunks, moving, testing, and accepting the results that takes the year, not the actual construction of the room.
I learned that given a large enough supply of Lego bricks, their flaws become readily apparent. We owned a day care centre, so I had literally twenty pounds or more Lego bricks at my disposal (after hours and then after we sold the centre).
Legos are heavily dependent on gravity, the gripping power of a brick is impressive (especially if they are new), but torque is more impressive. There is a limit to how far you can build a Lego ledge, and that includes shoring it up with Lego bracing (diagonal Lego bracing is more susceptible to torque). The torque doesn't apply well to a brick that's designed for straight down pressure.
Legos are heavily bound by gravity. The compressive forces of the walls provide grip. In my attempts to rebuild cathedral wall structures, the compression could not be balanced between the flying buttresses and the inner walls, so the buttresses mainly provided a stabilizing effect. The problem was that at about five or so feet, the bottom bricks would not hold because the weight of the bricks above expanded the plastic enough to negate the brick's grip.
Legos provide little resistance to upward pressure (by design this is how you release them, to a degree). This means that as structures sway, you effectively reduce the gripping power of some connection within the structure. This is the equivalent to stress related failure. A larger Lego structure must be glued or it will fail due to these internal forces.
Finally if you attempt to fix some of these issues by sandwiching critical joints, you add mass, which compounds the problem in other joints. Shoring up those eventually just increases the number of locations where failure could occur and statistics steps in and assures at least one failure, somewhere.
I won't even go into the issues with worn bricks, because those are obvious.
Few data centres expand to the size of our largest data centres, but by "designing like Lego" we will simplify things. The danger is that we might standardize on an architecture that has built-in limits. The architecture we currently have isn't as clean in vision as a Lego brick, but it already scales better than the Lego brick, even if it needs to do so by the default structure being slightly less elegant.
These Lego data centre visionaries have the right goal, making it simple, but they might be going about it in the wrong way. I've never heard a rational argument detailing how Lego bricks and data centre components are the same, so this might turn out to be a bad analogy implemented in hardware. Time will tell, but the centres we currently have did not come as the result of people deliberately trying to make data centres more complex.
If you compare
a) British/Canadian/Indian/Australian/NZ English
b) U.S. English
spelling and pronunciation,
it is invariably the case that the American version (b) is the one that reflects either -
ignorance of special rules of the language and therefore a resort to simplified general rules,
or a lazier and more utilitarian use of a subset of the language vocabulary and its grammar rules.
e.g. (First form not used by most Americans)
-Lego plural of Lego is a special case (possibly related to Latin or Greek derived English words)
-through instead of thru is special-case pronunciation and spelling
-colour vs color is an extra letter (not lazy) and is a special pronunciation rule
-cheque vs check reflects knowledge and acceptance of the origins of English words in words of other languages
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Is it some kind of virtualisation OS that runs over multiple machines, hence making data centre deployments easy?
Certainly nothing to do with LEGO which are little plastic bricks, that aren't good for halon delivery systems.
The use of oversimplified analogies based on childrens' toys by large companies to express common sense ideas disturbs me.
The concept of bricking out components in such a way that they may be assembled like Legoâ Brand building blocks (or whatever the 50 people who think it's important seem to think it should be called) can be ported to the concept of software design, as it already has in some regards. It's called Encapsulation. It's in very good practice when you're not the only one hacking at the code.
Why can't conventional buildings use this concept? Granted you wouldn't do it on a single family house, but when you start to build the bigger buildings once you have the structural integrity built, would it be worthwhile to slide in a building block that makes up a condo or a room or an office space?
It would make firewalls easier, and if the new "room block" had standardized connections for water, sewer, central air, electricity, and telecommunications, such connections could be made nearly instantly, and they could be metered. This would effectively lower the rent for all tenants, save the building owner on hefty utility bills, and pass along such costs to the tenant. Bearing the burden of utility bills has a marvelous effect on conservation.
Imagine what this could do for the new "green" building craze that's started up recently. Some "room blocks" could involve green technologies. Solar Panels on the exterior walls, or heat absorbent walls to allow the heating of water or whatever else a tenant might custom build into their "room-block" before ordering it from the room-block factory.
I think a lot would have to happen before economies of scale made this even remotely viable. A city would have to have dozens of very large buildings compatible with this system before anyone will be much interested in building a new building that is compatible with the system or develop a factory to manufacture them, or a transportation system that will swap them in and out on-demand and bring them to the warehouse to be refit.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
I can't give any information due to NDA, but we've taken a site from bare to operational with the first customer live in 88 days (and I'm speaking about tens of thousands of square feet of raised floor, associated chiller plant and electrical busses, several MW of paralleled UPS and of course the generators to feed all of that power and cooling, EC25 fire suppression, security installations, the works). Now, in that case, vendor lead times would be an issue but we'd pre-placed orders w/ the manufacturers for long lead items like generators or the several hundred ton chillers we use. That said, It's very much doable. Most of it entails having a group of people who *know* how datacenters work, and having vendors who can respond when you pull the trigger. If you know exactly how your equipment works, what the vendor requirements are for each stage of construction and commissioning, you can VERY quickly eliminate wasted time. Our biggest challenges were getting inspectors on site at the right times so we avoided losing day(s) as a time for that, and of course, weather (Waiting on the *poles* to get planted for an additional 3750 kVA feed for one of the transformers from the utility right of ways came down to the wire for us, no pun intended). Much like any construction project, having good engineers and project managers with boots on the ground is key.
through instead of thru is special-case pronunciation and spelling
Even in America, "thru" is thoroughly non-standard spelling. I've never understood what the hell possesses people to spell the word that way, to be honest.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
When will people start using i.e. and e.g. correctly?
i.e. stands for "id est", or "that is".
e.g. stands for "exempli gratia", or "for the sake of example".
Good rule of thumb: replace " i .e." with " i n other words", and " e .g." with "for e xample".
Being an Adult Fan of LEGO, I used to share the opinion that it was sad that they had so many custom parts.
It's true, to an extent, but the new bricks simply open up new possibilities. I build the sets because those LEGO designers show some true genius sometimes in their construction techniques... but even they don't always get it right, and people modify the plans all the time.
Moreover, the idea is basically that you don't HAVE to follow the directions, and even if you do, you can then take it apart and combine it with other LEGO to make new things...
One problem is that they now release instructions for building sets online for free. If there were no custom parts, you wouldn't have to buy the sets. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's certainly one of the reasons they do it... While I have problems with TLG, I don't mind the occasional new part, but they do abuse it. On the other hand, it's when they started doing things like this that they became profitable after a long slide downward. I'd rather have them making custom parts in order to increase sales than not being around at all.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
But do the data center modules come with glow-in-the-dark blocks?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
I'm don't think it's just ignorance on the American part. As I understand it, there was a concerted effort to simplify the language, the most obvious result of which is the simplified spelling of words like "night", "light", "analogue", "catalogue", "through" etc.
What I find interesting is that Americans seem to actively try to use what would be considered in academic circles as incorrect English. In the UK there are widely varying accents and many local words or phrases, but they do tend to follow at least some basic rules and any errors do seem to be born of simple ignorance, where as Americans just seem to do it deliberately.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ironically, there's a good argument that, because human memory works on a "remember the exceptions" basis, a simpler set of rules will encourage forgetting the existence or meaning of some words, and thus will lead to reduction in usable vocabulary. Some words were remembered (their existence remembered and their meaning remembered) BECAUSE of their unusual grammar or spelling rule, and/or the word family lineage patterns that marble-texture the full version of English.
Remove this texture and these landmarks of weirdness in the natural language, and you remove the map that helps the brain comprehend a rich-vocabulary version of the language.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Like, you know, I go: ...words with no guts no power.
When we eviscerate and castrate the language,
we get...
He goes:
Then she goes:
As if
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly.
Would love to see a very large Diesel Generator with a Windows logo stamped into the block or valve covers.
does it take to build a data center anyway?
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your suggestion that we learn from Lego. It has been duely noted and implemented as a course requirement for our engineers. We felt the most appropriate phase of education for this was primary school. We have checked, and fortunately all of our data centre engineers have this qualification.
Sincerely,
Eng G. Neer.
Human Resources
Megacorp Limited.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton.pdf
Dig all his papers:
he talks about using IBM cooling-on-the-hot-bits RACKS,
instead of building up your own,
so you just roll in 50 racks & lock 'em down, connect 'em, and fire 'em up.
He says organize by service, not by HW.
he says never shut down a server by "shutting it down", but instead by the power-switch, to make certain that failover works right, pervasively...
if you've got empty space because cooling/power is the limit, then spending on denser servers is stupid.
lots of gold in his writings...
goggle his other stuff, if y'all like...
Cheers,
Captain Obvious